Aspiring to develop new varieties of doubt better suited for modern urban life, you become a breeder of doubt. With meticulous care, you create pedigrees intended to thin out ferocity, heft and obsessive territoriality. Your living room becomes home to myriad doubts residing in rows of glass terrariums, which you take care to hermetically re-seal after performing the necessary feeding and cleaning, lest the doubts get out and take up residence in your mind; though they’ve been comfortably provided for, they’d surely seize any chance to jump into your mind, to inhabit a more expansive realm.
Doubts multiply quickly, so a couple weeks into the project, you’ve got several strains that are fairly innocuous, even affable. One batch is particularly frisky, often pouncing but only lightly, prone to clawing at your attention but only tentatively; to your delight, you find that you enjoy handling these doubts and end up routinely playing with them. Through the protective gear you wear, they tug at your confidence and prod your curiosity, murmuring question after solicitous question. You seem well on your way toward a companionable, docile breed of doubt.
One evening, you’re a little too pleased with this progress you’re making. Distracted by glee, you neglect to properly seal one of the terrariums after taking measurements of representative individuals in the latest generation. This young brood escapes, running away into the night in search of new homes and fresh pastures.
The following morning you see the empty terrarium and panic. There’s no telling how far uncontained doubts could have gone by now. They could be anywhere, and there’s no way to track down these doubts before they proliferate to plague countless minds and take tenacious hold upon the city. You pace about the living room and kitchen, alternating between berating yourself for getting careless and imagining worst-case scenarios.
When you’re able to calm down for a moment, it seems there is but one recourse: formulate a negacide that will wipe out all doubts, to prevent—or at least curtail—an outbreak of mass uncertainty that the escapees could cause. Though you know the negacide’s indiscriminate eradication of negative sentiments will lead to an epidemic of overconfidence, you see little choice in the matter and take solace in the likelihood that the period of widespread hubris will be brief.
You work relentlessly until early afternoon, when—exhausted by your intensive work on the negacide—you need a break. The kind with fresh air.
You are reluctant to go out, to find out how the escaped doubts have taken their toll on the confidence of city residents. But you’ll have to see the consequences of your carelessness at some point. That might as well be now.
To your surprise, nothing seems out of the ordinary as you walk down the block. It’s just traffic in the streets and pedestrians on the sidewalks, all moving with their usual pace and density. No one seems distraught with uncertainty. You wonder if the doubts took no interest in this neighborhood and sped off to find more appealing ones, corners of the city with a greater abundance of thoughts for them to gnaw on.
The normalcy of everything encourages you to go to the park nearby. Along the way, you walk by two men having a jovial conversation at a bus stop, and the inquisitive tone is striking.
“Isn’t there something—oh, I don’t know--ironic about these pride swallowing contests held here every summer?” you overhear the taller one asking.
“Ah, perhaps, but doesn’t your question presuppose the answer to the question of what the true prize or purpose of the contest is?” the bearded one asks in return.
Their back and forth of questions intrigues you, but having no interest in pride swallowing competitions, you continue on your way.
For a Wednesday afternoon, the park is unusually lively with parkgoers, many of them talking as they stroll the gravel paths; others sit on benches snacking on chips or granola bars, while some simply gaze upon the landscape made newly lush by the recent rain; a few scribble away in notebooks. They create a social atmosphere of geniality and leisure, befitting of the mild temperature and ample sunlight.
You pause at the edge of the lily pond to be revitalized by the blossoms on its glassy surface. There, ducks nap in the shallows, and fragments of conversation intermingle with the warm breeze, as though the air has turned gossipy, eager to spread personal tidbits it is privy to.
“But maybe he’s not intentionally flirting with her,” a bright voice suggests.
A worried one replies, “Is it possible to unconsciously or accidentally flirt with someone?”
“Sure,” comes the first voice again, undaunted. “There could be times when you don’t know you’re coming off as flirty. Like you’re innocently curious about someone and get carried away. Is there a chance he’s just… quirky and aloof?”
“But might you get so far ahead of yourself that she won’t be able to catch up to you?” asks someone from a nearby picnic table.
“I don’t know if the lack of intercognitive fidelity necessarily means romantic incompatibility,” remarks a man as he walks past you in the company of a woman who seems to be a work colleague.
“What would it be like if that kind of bird weren’t here?” comes the voice of a child.
This you can’t let pass you by. You turn in the direction of this question and see a small boy and his mother. They’re looking at a meadow lark on the ground a few feet in front of them.
“I’m not sure what you’re asking. Tell me more about what you’re thinking,” the mother says.
“Like if those birds all disappeared, would there be too many worms in the ground?”
“Oh, that’s what you mean,” the mother says. “I don’t know what the world would be like without them. Maybe we can find out at the nature center.”
And with that, a shift in the city’s psychology becomes palpable to you. It’s easy to write off all these conversations as merely chitchat, but these words are tinged with consideration that is lightly but unmistakably doubtful in character.
Uncertainty that pride swallowing competitions aren’t as valuable as they’re purported to be. Uncertainty toward the apparent flirty-ness of a romantic partner or interest. Uncertainty about how advantageous it is to be ahead of one’s self. Uncertainty over what can be taken for granted.
None of that uncertainty is frantic or debilitating. But instead curious, humble, even exuberant.
A wave of relief sweeps through you, nearly crumpling you to the grassy ground. Then, with your conscience cleansed of that harrowing guilt, your skin becomes tinged with an exuberant warmth, like are wrapped in the glowing delight accorded by your accomplishment.
You have succeeded in cultivating cordial skepticism. And what better time for it than after the April showers?
Fascinated by the ways in which fiction can serve as a means of metacognition, Soramimi Hanarejima crafts stories to explore the nature of thought. Soramimi is the author of Visits to the Confabulatorium (Montag Press Collective, 2017) and works on information design projects that seek to articulate aspects of subjectivity.
